Adaptive Backstepping Control of an Indoor Micro-Quadrotor

Abstract

Micro-Quadrotor is one of the most popular VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aerial robots and has enormous potential applications in the field of near-area surveillance and exploration in military and commercial applications. However, stabilizing and position control of the robot are difficult tasks because of the nonlinear dynamic behavior and model uncertainties. Backstepping is a widely used control law for under- actuated systems including quadrotor. But general backstepping control algorithm needs accurate model parameters and isn't robust to external disturbances. In this study, an adaptive integral backstepping control algorithm is proposed to realize robust control of quadrotor. The proposed control algorithm can estimate disturbances online and therefore improve the robustness of the system. Both simulation and experiment results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed control algorithm.